High yield manufacturing of fully screen-printed organic electrochemical transistors

Abstract

The potential of the screen printing method for large-scale production of organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs), combining high production yield with low cost, is here demonstrated. Fully screen-printed OECTs of 1 mm2 area, based on poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) doped with poly(styrensulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS), have been manufactured on flexible polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates. The goal of this project effort has been to explore and develop the printing processing to enable high yield and stable transistor parameters, targeting miniaturized digital OECT circuits for large-scale integration (LSI). Of the 760 OECTs manufactured in one batch on a PET sheet, only two devices were found malfunctioning, thus achieving an overall manufacturing yield of 99.7%. A drain current ON/OFF ratio at least equal to 400 was applied as the strict exclusion principle for the yield, motivated by proper operation in LSI circuits. This consistent performance of low-footprint OECTs allows for the integration of PEDOT:PSS-based OECTs into complex logic circuits operating at high stability and accuracy.